J S Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach in March 1685 into a family of musicians stretching back several generations. Orphaned at ten, he was raised by his older brother Johann Christoph, and from his teens held a succession of organist and Konzertmeister posts in central Germany — at Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, Weimar, and Köthen — before his appointment in 1723 as Thomaskantor at the Thomasschule in Leipzig, a position he held until his death.

His output covers nearly every genre of his time except opera. The Leipzig years produced the bulk of the sacred cantatas, the *St Matthew* and *St John Passions*, the *Mass in B minor*, the *Christmas Oratorio*, and the late contrapuntal works including *The Art of Fugue* and the *Musical Offering*. The earlier Köthen years produced the *Brandenburg Concertos*, the violin and cello suites, and *The Well-Tempered Clavier*, Book I. His instrumental and keyboard works became foundational for the next two centuries of Western music after their rediscovery in the nineteenth century.

Bach went almost blind in his final months and died in Leipzig in July 1750. His reputation through the late eighteenth century was largely that of an organist; the wider rediscovery of the choral works followed Mendelssohn’s 1829 revival of the *St Matthew Passion*. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his sacred and instrumental music in twentieth-century performance.